It helped that Beme was co-founded by Casey Neistat,
a filmmaker with a huge presence on social media, and
it has an inspirational
message to boot. The app, which revolves around short,
unedited videos, is meant to be a more honest
and natural way to share experiences.

But nearly four months after Beme’s debut, much of the
initial excitement around the app has died down.

Beme downloads have dropped sharply each month, according to
Apptopia,
a mobile app market intelligence
firm (Beme wouldn't share its own
data). Apptopia estimates that Beme downloads fell
from 285,000 in the last two weeks of July to only
50,000 in all of October.

It’s no longer in the top 150 social media apps in Apple’s App
Store either. Google Trends, which displays Google search
interest over time, shows that searches for Beme have also
plummeted since launch.

What's the mood at Beme while all this is happening? We
dropped by the company's Manhattan headquarters to see for
ourselves.

It turns out that Neistat and co. are more optimistic than ever.

Beme HQ

Beme's headquarters in
Manhattan.Tim Stenovec / Tech
Insider

There are two ways to know that you’ve reached the headquarters
for Beme, which are housed in what used to be a furniture store
in downtown Manhattan.

One is the huge green neon “B” above the frosted glass doors.

The other is the group of kids waiting outside of the office for
a selfie with Neistat.

During my roughly hour long visit to Beme, I accompanied Neistat
outside of the office twice so he could say hi to and get
pictures with some of his fans.

All were boys who appeared to be in their teens. Some wore
Beme T-shirts or had Beme stickers on their skateboards. One said
he had just landed from Chicago and came straight from the
airport to find Neistat. Neistat signed another boy’s skateboard,
writing “AJ, stay in school” in his distinct, block letters.

A screenshot from Beme's
new Apple TV app.Beme

When you step inside Beme’s office, the first thing you notice is
a big TV on the wall in the waiting area.

It features a constantly
changing stream of short vertical videos arranged three
across. Some showed people driving. Some showed them
running. A lot of them showed kids in class. One showed a kid
carving the Beme logo into his skateboard deck. In a matter of
seconds, I saw indoor skiing in France and monkeys in trees in
South Africa — and videos from Ireland, England, Greece,
Baghdad, Colorado, Saudi Arabia, Maryland, Sweden, Texas, and San
Salvador.

These are Bemes — four-second videos of everyday life — that
people upload to share with their friends and connections on
the iPhone app. (The office TV is running the new Apple TV
app.)

Beme bears a lot of similarities to other video sharing apps
like Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, or Vine, but unlike
those apps, you can’t see your video before or while you
post it. You can’t even edit it. And you don’t even know what
you’re recording since your phone’s screen remains blank when
you’re shooting your video.

Beme is also different because you don’t tap a button on the
screen to start recording, like you do with most other apps.
Instead, you cover the phone’s proximity sensor, the tiny dot on
the front of your iPhone, to start recording.

Neistat demonstrates how to record a video using Beme.

The idea is that recording videos, which expire after 48 hours,
won’t interfere with what you’re doing — how you capture video
encourages you not to look at your phone. And instead of sharing
a staged or edited post like you’d do with other apps like Vine,
Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook, you’re sharing something more
real, something more raw.

With Beme, Neistat says he’s trying to bridge the gap between
people who don’t see themselves as traditional “creators” — those
who make and edit movies or edit photos — and those who just want
to share.

“We’re giving the world a tool to share what their life is like,
to share what their perspective is like. And that’s very
different from a tool for them to create,” Neistat says. “This is
not a place for sharing beautiful photos. This is not place for
sharing puking rainbows. This is a place for sharing
perspective.”

Screenshots of the Beme app.Beme / Tech Insider

How does he feel about growth so far? Pretty good, all
things considered.

Neistat said there is already an engaged group of people around
the app — the top 50% of weekly active users share 20 videos a
week, he said, and the top 20% share 44 videos a week. Those
figures, however, are difficult to put in perspective without
knowing how many users Beme actually has.

Six months ago, Neistat would have described the app’s mission as
“naively optimistic,” he said. But now, after almost four months
of seeing how people share, use, and interact with the app, it’s
“standing on firm ground.”

He emphasized that right now the company isn’t focused on
getting a large number of people to download the app — they
haven’t spent any money on advertising — because it’s still in
beta.

The team doesn’t see the app as complete — the current version
you can download in the App Store is 0.7. For example, there’s no
tutorial or guide showing people how to actually use the app.
There’s also no Android version yet.

The focus, Neistat said, is to keep current Beme users engaged,
learn how people use it, and add more features over time.

“Our ambition in launching such a primitive product was to give
us an understanding about how and why someone would use something
so radical,” Neistat says.

Plamen Marinov, a 19-year old student in Atlanta who downloaded
Beme the first day it became available, is one of those people.

He told Tech Insider that he fully appreciated the concept
of Beme when he was at a Foo Fighters concert and found himself
sharing his experience on both Snapchat and Beme.

“Whenever I would take a Snapchat video, I'd find myself staring
down at my phone, thinking about what caption to put and who I
should send it to, yet Bemeing moments of the concert felt
effortless and I didn't miss a single moment of the amazing
show,” he wrote in an email. “By the end of the show,
Snapchatting the action felt like a chore, but I only continued
because many of my friends have not yet discovered Beme.”

Ronny Tam, a 20-year-old freelance filmmaker in Toronto, told
Tech Insider that he likes to use Beme to see how people around
the world live.

“When looking to follow people, I usually search for people who
live in different continents who would have different values,
cultures, hobbies,” Tam wrote in an email. “That allows me to get
a glimpse of their life but not enough that it's intrusive.”

Beme's new Interesting Strangers feature gives you
random videos from people all over the world.Beme / Tech Insider

This is exactly what Neistat is going for with Beme.

Beme doesn’t have a mission statement written anywhere in the
office or online, but Neistat said it’s “to promote empathy by
sharing perspective.”

“If you can look around and see how everyone else lives, you can
see that everyone else lives the same, regardless of social
status, gender identity, sexual preference. By understanding how
whole world lives — understanding that we’re all the same —
empathy will grow from that,” Neistat says.

It's a message that Neistat and his millions of fans believe in.
Now they've just got to convince the rest of the world.